A Tough Hand


A Q 8 7
A J 8 4 3
------
K 7 4 3
J 9 5 4
K 10 9 Q 6 5 2
K 10 8 3 J 9 7 6 5 2
J 10 8 Q 6
K 10 6 3 2
8
A Q 4 Contract: 6 spades
A 9 5 2 Opening lead: various

A tough hand. Even looking at all 52 cards, it's not easy to pick out a winning path quickly. Let's see, playing from dummy, which means setting up the heart suit. It'd be a cakewalk on 2-2 spades. But that's not the way it was, and we're going to come up short trying to establish hearts: Win the opening club lead in the closed hand, go to the A of hearts, ruff a heart, back on a club to the A (you knew from the beginning that you needed a 3-2 club break), ruff another heart. Without trump leads, we've gotten through three rounds of hearts. But nothing quite works from this point.
You could get back for a fourth round ruff by way of ruffing a diamond. But you can't ruff with the 10, or you'll be overruffed and you can't ruff with the K, for then you couldn't draw all West's trump. Indeed, even if you could push through a ruff of the 10 and cashed the K of trump, now you wouldn't have a re-entry to dummy, except of course through ruffing another diamond, which would establish West's J on the 3-1 split. There is, to be sure, a pie-in-the-sky line that works: ruff a heart with the 2, back playing West for the J 9 low, which is to say, playing the lowest spade that wins, ruff a heart with the 10, back to dummy with the 6 to the lowest spade that wins, ruff with the K. You now have drawn two rounds of trump and have two left in dummy. Ruff a diamond and draw the last trump. Yeah, right. But that's not the way we play bridge. Nobody's going to take a first-round finesse of the 7 if West plays low, when spades might have been 2-2 all along.
You might note that playing from dummy, trying to establish a 5th heart renders the A of diamonds useless. You can only sluff a fourth club, which should be a winner when trump are out, or the fifth heart, which also would be a winner if you could get past that fourth round. That doesn't make it an absolute certainty that you're wasting a trick somewhow, but you kinda feel something is out of whack when not using that ace. So . . .
How about playing from the closed hand. We can forget about hearts, except maybe for entry purposes. Clubs are still 4-4, declarer needing a 3-2 split whichever hand we count out from. Why, we only seem to need to ruff two diamonds in the short hand where we'd been looking to ruff three rounds of hearts. If we can get those two ruffs in and have the entries to draw trump, we'd be home free, no? Let's see.
Win the opening lead in the closed hand, ruff a diamond, ace of hearts, ruff a heart, ruff a second diamond, cash the A Q of trump, ruff a heart and cash the last trump. Now cash the second club honor and lose that club you must. Well, if we didn't get any luck in the spade distribution, it would appear that there's no small bit of luck here: the person with the defense's club winner has had to give up all his hearts! He can only return a diamond and declarer could then cash his third club winner, the fourth round of the suit, for his contract.
One declarer got the first half right: Win the club lead in the closed hand, ruff a diamond, ace of hearts, ruff a heart, ruff a diamond, A Q of spades, ruff a heart with the 10. That brings us to trick 8, and here's the rub: If he draws the last trump, he's out of trump when he loses a third round club, and maybe the defense could cash a heart. He's going to need one bit of luck here, which is that the hand with the third-round club winner has no more hearts. It's his only hope, and we see that it's there.
Unfortunately, this declarer let the last trump go hang, cashed the ace of diamonds and then conceded a club trick. Oh, he'd saved a trump against a diamond lead, but that only established West's third trump, and declarer, after coming so close, was down one.
Why on earth did he cash his diamond stopper? That left him with no chance for his contract (aside from a defensive error). I can only suggest, and I've seen this cast of mind hundreds of times, that he wanted to put off risk, a possible setting trick as long as possible, which indeed he didn't suffer until the last trick of the hand. But by taking a risk earlier, he wouldn't have had to suffer that at all!
There is no Law of Compensating Good Luck, and it would be misleading to suggest that there is. You can have a hand where everything goes wrong, just as you can have a hand where everything goes right, maybe too right in that this now makes you underbid. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that often a series of bad breaks will be counteracted by good luck elsewhere on the hand. As here.
Declarer didn't get a 2-2 spade break. But by Golly, there was that one piece of luck that favored the declarer who ruffed out the closed hand's diamonds, which was that the defender who wins the third round of clubs has no hearts to lead and would have had to return a diamond to declarer's ace. But a jittery declarer exchanged a roughly 50% chance for a zero percent chance.
I first picked up this hand several years ago. When I picked it t'other day, I noted that I'd writtedn "unnecessary" at the top of the page, which meant nothing to me, and that I'd put a small arrow at trick 9, which I paid no attention to until I went through this declarer's line. Further, I had the vague (and false) notion that neither way worked. From that false premise, I worked out a different line that works, which was to duck the opening club lead. You hafta to lose a club somewhere on the hand. Now declarer's in the catbird seat and can handle any lead from the defense. A club? You win in the closed hand, ruff a diamond, heart ace, heart ruff, ruff another diamond, cash the A Q of trump, ruff a second heart, cash the K of spades and now everything runs. A diamond? Gives you a head start on ruffing two diamonds. A spade? You've gotta let it ride to dummy's honors -- well, you can try the 10 to no avail, but you've gotta cash dummy's top spades soon anyway. And your position is the same on a heart shift. In each case (a heart or a spade), you're in dummy, need to get to the closed hand three times -- twice to ruff two diamonds, once to draw the last trump. Okay, win the lead in dummy, ace of hearts (if there on a spade lead), ruff a heart, ruff a diamond, back on a club to the Ace, ruff a diamond, cash dummy's remaining spade honor or honors, and ruff a heart with the 10. (The sequence of two heart ruffs and one lead to the Ace of clubs can be in any order.) Declarer now draws the last trump and cashes out his ace of diamonds and club winners.
This would seem to be a little safer that the line this declarer almost took, since it doesn't matter who has the long hearts (provided they're 4-3). I know now I meant it was totally "unnecessary" for declarer to cash the ace of diamonds. Could he have lost it, had the hand with the club winner also had hearts? Not at all. There's only one heart out, and at worst declarer has to sluff a club winner on the fourth heart. And my little arrow at trick 9 was the point where declarer queered his contract, which I didn't realize until I went through declarer's play and saw that ruffing two diamonds was entirely feasible and should have led to a successful contract.
Don't cash top winners without a good reason I've often exhorted my readers. Sometimes declarers will run a healthy 4-4 fit, presumably to give the defense discarding problems, but harming themselves by wiping out communication. At other times, on an unbalanced strong suit, declarer has more trouble sluffing from the short hand than the defense has. Oh, it is a common occurrence. Here it was just one trick, just one top winner cashed unnecessarily, and it cost declarer about 15 or 20 IMP's.
Yikes! After making this entry, I turned the page around and found a declarer who'd taken the opening club lead and promptly led three rounds of trump. Aren't you supposed to get the trump out? Well, not exactly. Not here in any event. With three rounds of trump, you can't ruff two diamonds in dummy, nor can you ruff more than two hearts in the closed hand, and there just aren't the winners there. That's novice bridge to jump on that three rounds of trump before asking how many winners you have on that line, and more to the point, how you can bring the number up to 12.
I then noticed that I'd made a notation that this was Illustration 31 under "Counting Winners". A little more investigation showed that under Butchering", then "Cashing Top Winners Too Soon," this is Number One! So this was unwittingly the third time I've entered this hand on this web site. Perhaps I'd better destroy the page. But then, how about a fourth entry under "Reasons for Not Drawing Trump Immediately".